Straight, No Chaser

A government can threaten bans, taxes, and capital controls, but what happens when the thing it is trying to control is just code running on a global, decentralised network? We sit down with Jacques “Jabu Jacks” Strydom to get past the noise and talk about Bitcoin in South Africa the way business owners, engineers, and everyday people actually experience it. The conversation starts with identity...

Owning Bitcoin is easy. Using it in the real world, without wrecking your savings plan, is where things get interesting. We chat with Nick Darlington, a South African freelancer and builder who went from travel and a self-made writing career to launching Bitcoin Friendly SA, a project focused on growing Bitcoin payments and a local Bitcoin circular economy.We get into the personal backstory...

We go deep on what “sovereign computing” looks like when you try it for real, from spinning up a Fedimint federation to self-hosting services that keep working even when platforms or politics turn against you. We then connect local AI, persistent knowledge bases, and geopolitics to one question: do we own our tools or do we rent our future?• choosing a deliberately clickbait title and what it...

When the lights go out and the basics stop working, most people either rage at politics or retreat into cynicism. We chose a third option: talk honestly about what freedom requires when the state centralises power, fails at delivery, and still asks for more control. David Ansara from the Free Market Foundation joins us for a wide-ranging, South Africa grounded conversation on classical...

AI agents are starting to feel less like chatbots and more like little workers you have to raise. We talk about OpenClaw, Start9, and what it actually takes to run self-hosted AI on real-world hardware, from a Raspberry Pi to an old laptop that should have been retired years ago. The “grown-up Tamagotchi” idea sticks because these agents only become useful when you feed them context, tools, and...

Imagine telling a stranger your most personal message so they can walk it across the room to your partner—then watching them copy it into a company database. That’s how most digital communication works today. We unpack why privacy is not secrecy, why “I have nothing to hide” is a trap, and how to build a tech life that works in your interest rather than mining it.We dive into sovereign...

We share hard-won lessons from Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town: live Lightning demos that clear cross-border in minutes, cafés running BTCPay, and African builders shipping useful tools without permission. We dig into agentic AI, offline comms, the fiat circus, and why self-custody is a peaceful opt-out.• stand-out moments from a builder-led, Bitcoin-only conference • real-time Orange demo: EU, UK,...

We revisit a live panel from Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town and argue that 2025’s flat price masked a deeper bull run in infrastructure, adoption, and freedom tech. Builders pushed Lightning, open-source mining, Nostr, and circular economies while institutions edged in.• sideways price as distraction from real adoption• Lightning capacity, routing, and L2 experimentation advancing• Stratum V2 and...

We trade war stories about AI coding that dazzles then stalls, and show how self-hosted LLMs and agents can reclaim privacy and time. The talk shifts to real-world Bitcoin: QR payments across South Africa, M-Pesa bridges in Kenya, community custody with FediMint, and a world-first open secure element from Trezor.• AI tools that impress early then hit walls• Self-hosted LLMs on Start9 for privacy...

The news cycle says crisis; history says pattern. We sit down with political philosopher and lecturer Gerhard Wolmarans to test whether our moment is truly exceptional or simply another liminal passage where the old order fades and the new hasn’t yet taken shape. From Rome to Mali, the Glorious to the French Revolution, Gerhard traces how change arrives—sometimes as a flood, sometimes as a slow...